7. Sport is where Men become as Gods

So said the Ancient Greeks. And it is in the sporting arena that these Gods push themselves to levels of endurance and achievement way beyond the human. Roger Bannister bursting his lungs to break the four-minute mile, flying in the face of accepted medical and scientific fact…his great opponent, John Landy, smashing his time by a full second and a half just one month later – that’s superhuman. But when the two men faced each other later that same summer in a race dubbed ‘The Miracle Mile’ – that was something else entirely. That’s when the sport became an allegory for something both powerfully human and gloriously divine. If sport at its most inspirational is a distillation of human endeavour, a symbol of man’s need to strive for physical excellence, then when it’s taken to its very limit, the resulting spectacle says something fundamental about what it is to be human... and what it is to be God.

6. Cover thine bases

If the 21st Century is teaching us one thing it is to never accept responsibility. Politicians and bankers, athletes and celebrities, those in charge of your career and your money and your public services and your private aspirations... it’s never their fault. When things (inevitably) go wrong, when things fall apart and the centre doesn’t hold – it’s always someone else who cops the blame. The ruling classes, the bosses, the decision makers and public figures – they’ve got their scapegoats, their fall guys, their messengers ready to be shot. Company Directors walk away from bankrupt businesses with bonuses intact; politicians fail up from one office to the next, while anonymous office jockeys and hapless civil servants fall by the wayside. And for those in the public eye with messy personal lives, the cheaters and dabblers, the drug addicts and philanderers... they’ve got addictive personalities to blame, or bi-polar disorder, or bad advisors, or – worst of all – “paradise syndrome”, whereby the very state of having everything you’ve always dreamed of leads to unhappiness/drug addiction/sex with teenagers (delete as applicable). And when they're rumbled it's the advisors, the therapists, the PR team who duly takes the hit. The lesson? Don’t go into anything without your excuses lined up. Always be ready to apportion blame for your own failures. Cover thine bases.

5. It is the fate of the ignorant to condemn

Rejection is a kneejerk reaction, it’s the instinct of the wary. But it’s also the watchword of the ignorant. I don’t understand; I don’t comprehend; I’m not in full possession of the facts... so I’m out. I don’t want it. Go away. Leave me alone with the things that I know. Round-Earthists were condemned, Darwinians were condemned. (Some still are.) And always, always, by those wielding ignorance as a stick with which to beat their points home. (This is not to say that every condemnation springs from ignorance, however. Rather that the ignorant cannot help but condemn.)

4. It's not called "catching", it's called "fishing"

One weekend’s fishing can teach us more about life than years spent in libraries: not least the importance of patience and stoicism and the fact that a few moments of triumph really are worth hours of apparent failure. But most of all, it teaches us that trying is always more important than achieving. The important thing about fishing is not the catching of fish. It’s the apparent failure, the waiting, the hours in which nothing happens – that’s the real point of fishing. They are an oasis, a bubble, in which the fisherman can achieve something like zen – with the river, with the fish, with nature, with himself. This is why fishing is not called catching. The catching is an afterthought, it barely matters at all.

3. My favourite parks are car parks...

...Grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag. Take your Year in Provence and shove it up your ass. From the song I Spy by Pulp, on their 1995 Different Class album. Later described by singer Jarvis Cocker as “my justification for being a doley scumbag”. The point about this album is that during the height of the so-called Britpop Wars, when Northern Working Class Oiks Oasis fought Southern Middle Class Mockneys Blur for who could be most in touch with “ver kids” (as Smash Hits used to put it), both were blindsided by an album loaded with the authentic voice of pre-Millennial British youth. Different Class was furious and intelligent, bitter and sarcastic and vicious and hilarious – and in Common People gave us the most unlikely combination of dancealong pop and incisive social commentary in the history of the singles chart (it reached Number 2 – kept off the top spot by a cover of Unchained Melody by the actors Robson Greene and Jerome Flynn – draw your own conclusions). But in an album full of razor-sharp poetics, it was these lines that stood out – a full decade before anyone ever used the word “chav”. Parks, grass, birds – even language itself has divided along class lines.

2. They fuck you up, your mum and dad

Which is another way of saying “blame your parents”. For everything. (But give them credit for nothing.) Have you seen any daytime TV? It turns out that nothing is your fault! All your crimes, all your faults, all your shortcomings as a human being, all your lack of judgement, lack of taste, lack of ambition, drive, purpose and meaning... it’s because of your parents. They didn’t love you enough, somehow. They didn’t encourage you, give you the attention you deserved. Or they smoked. Or argued. Or worked too hard. Or didn’t work at all. They sent you to the local crap comprehensive where you slipped into unnoticed mediocrity... or they packed you off to a school that pushed you too hard, that expected too much, that left you shorn of any self-confidence. Whatever’s wrong with you, it’s because of them. None of it is your fault. You don’t need to take responsibility for your failings. This is the great get-out clause of our age.

1. Everything you know is wrong

If humility is the first step to enlightenment, then knowing you know nothing is the first step to wisdom. But how can we know we know nothing? It’s a paradox – to even argue the point implies knowledge. Rather we should accept that we have a vast amount of knowledge – and that all of it is wrong. When golfers feel their game is dropping off they “take apart” their swing – they try to forget everything they’ve been told, everything they’ve learnt about striking the ball... and they start again. They learn again. If we can similarly take apart our preconceptions, our assumptions, our existing beliefs, if we can admit it’s all wrong, then our minds will be clear to start again, to learn again, to rebuild our swings.